fEaTURE ] SOlaR DEcaThlON
The Boston Architectural College is
competing in the U.S. Department of
Ene rgy’s Solar Decathlon. We are one of
20 schools worldwide selected to design
and construct a net-zero e nergy solar home
on the National Mall in September 2009.
Typical of the BAC, our students have
brought us to this place. Self-starters, high
achievers , able to both think about designing
how we should live on the earth, and able
to implement a beautiful and responsible
scheme for doing so, BAC students from all
our design disciplines are challenging the
nor mal way of things with this two-year-long
student project. We could not have chosen
a better time for the challenge.
Americans, it turns out, have inherited
a system of constructing and financing
housing that provides buildings which are
unaffordable, do not last nearly long enough,
and require huge infusions of fossil fuels just
to be livable both summer and winter.
While many supposed innovators have been
concentrating on the form of housing in the
past, it is housing’s per formance that also
requires a major focus from designe rs.
At the same time, American higher
education has inherited a system of organiz-
ing knowledge and understanding into
separate academic disciplines, creating false
boundaries between bodies of knowledge
and producing areas of intellectual endeavor
that are very narrow, whose adherents
speak mainly to themselves.
The Solar Decathlon provides the BAC
a way to address both these conditions
simultaneously by presenting us a model of
problem -based learning. The problem is how
to house 10 billion people on the earth over
the next generation in a way that integrates
them with the planet’s ecology as we now
understand it. Was this part of the curricu-
lum when you were in design school ? I didn’t
think so... yet this is how we are approaching
design education at the BAC in 2009.
Students from all our disciplines are
collaborating on the Decathlon through a
shared educational model developed over
the last year by the students themselves.
Our plan is for this model to migrate to
other parts of our curriculum, based on
its success in the Decathlon project.
Partnered now with Tufts University;
engaged in collaborative learning, integrated
design, and ultimately, integrated project
delivery: this is what we are doing, on the
international stage ; and as a result, no matter
how the actual Solar Decathlon competition
ends next September, the BAC wins.
The BAC seeks cash and in kind
donations to support the 2009 Solar
Decathalon . For more information on
how you can best suppor t the Solar
Decathlon BAC/Tufts Team, please
contact tracey.thompson @the-bac.edu
or 617.585.0281.
Why WE aRE IN ThE SOlaR DEcaThlON
Our students are thinking about how we should live on the Ear th
and how to implement a beautiful and responsible scheme.
Dean Jeff Stein, Head of the School of Architecture
(l–r) colin booth, Sarah howard-mchugh, antje Danielson, NREl rep. mike Wassamer
pRacTIcE
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